With spot prices on uranium backing off from historic highs, Australian-based Peninsula Energy Ltd. has agreed to sell as much as $117 million worth of Wyoming uranium to a European nuclear fuel buyer from a mine under development near Gillette.
Peninsula said that it plans to sell between $88 million and $117 million worth of uranium through its Strata Energy Inc. unit, which operates the Lance project in northeastern Wyoming.
In November 2023 at a precious metals summit in Zurich, Peninsula Energy’s Managing Director and CEO Wayne Heili said that his company was planning to build a processing plant and start uranium production with the fully permitted Lance project by the end of 2024.
The company reaffirmed in a regulatory filing this week that construction is on-track for production in the final three months of 2024.
Heili also said that there is a lot of exploration potential for its Strata unit at Lance because of the huge land area.
To pay for restart of production at the Lance facility, Lance raised nearly $39.2 million in late 2023.
The agreement requires the company to sell 1.2 million pounds of uranium over a six-year period starting in 2028 to the European nuclear fuel buyer Synatom, which manages the supply of enriched uranium to Belgium’s nuclear power plants.
With the inclusion of this new sales agreement, the company’s total contractual sales obligation over the upcoming decade is 6 million pounds.
A Wyoming Uranium Restart
Uranium producers are restarting mines across Wyoming because of an upward pricing trend for uranium and a nuclear renaissance.
Nuclear power is gaining momentum as a “critical part of the green energy mix,” the company said in this week’s filing.
The filing also pointed to legislation in the U.S. Congress that could spark demand for domestic supplies of uranium should lawmakers approve ta ban on Russian imports.
The U.S. House passed legislation in December to ban imports of the fuel for nuclear power plants as part of Washington’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Similar legislation has been held up in the Senate.
On Wednesday, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm encouraged lawmakers in a congressional hearing to ban uranium supplies from Russia, as doing so would spur domestic development of fuel for next generation nuclear reactors.
Uranium spot prices hit $106 in early February but have since backed off to the low $80s, according to Atlanta-based UxC LLC, which tracks uranium spot prices on a nuclear fuel exchange.
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
